perl: March 2009 Archives

If you are a student, many of the great opportunities that GSoC opens up are described in this video, Code Conversations #3 with Leslie Hawthorn.
She goes into many success stories of previous students and talks about
how there is room for all skill levels, not just experts. There is also a Youtube video made by Joshua McAdams about The Perl Foundation and Google Summer of Code.

Deadline

The deadline is this Friday 3 April 2009, 17:00 UTC/12 Noon PDT, so now is the time to submit your application! There is the project ideas page for you to see what there is to hack on and the application template to hammer your ideas into a plan. We have a google group for students to ask questions and there are always some helpful people in #soc-help on irc.perl.org to ask. For up-to-the minutes status updates, follow me on twitter and/or search for the "#gsoc" tag on your favorite aggregator.

Students, submit your application now and get feedback from the community on the GSoC webapp, Melange! Now is the best time to get involved in the open source project that you have always dreamed of working on and get paid to do it

Students interested in learning more about applying for GSoC2009 with TPF can join the mailing list and read up on The Perl Foundation wiki . For breaking news you can follow me at @dukeleto or join us on IRC on #soc-help on irc.perl.org .

Those interested in being mentors should sign up here as well as getting on the mailing list . If you are Just Another Perl Hacker that wants to help students decide on what to work on or give them feedback on different project ideas, then please join the student mailing list and dish out some of that knowledge to those in need.

Student Applications are due April 3: 12 Noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. That is approaching quickly, so start joining the fun.

Eric Wilhelm and I attended a Google Summer of Code info-session at UWashingtion on Friday, which was attended by a few dozen students that had very diverse backgrounds and interests. We answered many basic questions about how mentoring works, especially when mentors and students are spread across time zones and language barriers. Trista Taylor (a university liaison for Google) had slides and gave an overview of what GSoC is about, then Eric did a general overview of the state of Perl. I followed up with some specific about what TPF did last year and some hints for prospective students on these slides. Then Craig Dowell from the ns-3 Network Simulator Project talked about their organization's involvement and experiences in GSoC. All around it was a good experience and many students that had never heard of GSoC before got a taste for what it's all about.

I would definitely recommend doing this to other mentoring organizations and I am definitely interested in further activities strengthening the ties between Perl and academia.

I have created a Google doc web-form/spreadsheet to keep track of mentor interest and to have handy when I fill out the GSoC mentor organization application. If you have emailed me expressing interest in being a mentor, please fill out this spiffy web-form so that logistic nightmares can be averted.

Are you an eligble student that wants to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2009? Do you want to work on the exciting Rakudo or Parrot projects, or a CPAN module, or your favorite Perl application, or hack on Perl 5 internals? Then you want to apply to The Perl Foundation. Right now this means contacting me directly at jaleto at gmail dot com. Keeping in contact with Twitter is also good, the #gsoc tag is very useful. You may also want to get some ideas from the 2008 projects.

Applying involves coming up with a well-written document that describes exactly what features you will add or create, along with a timeline with "milestones" of what will be accomplished each week of the summer. Of course this changes with circumstances, but having a good plan always helps. The community members of the project that you apply to should help you with this, as well as give you advice about what is possible in the allotted time and give advice as to what is possible with the current infrastructure of the code. The best ways to do this is to get on developer mailing lists, introduce yourself, perhaps fix a small bug, add a test or some documentation and most probably you will be given some kind of commit access.

If you want to hack on Perl 6 on Parrot aka Rakudo, then all you need is a free GitHub account and you can contribute patches directly. You do this by pressing the "Fork" button. You should be presented with a page that says there is some "hardcore forking action" going on and then be redirected to your brand-new fresh personal fork of Rakudo. More on this in future posts.

One of the nice features of GitHub is the network-view of a project. For instance, here is the network view of rakudo.git with a base of my fork. It allows you to visualize which branches have which features pretty quickly, which tells you which branches you should merge with. This has turned out to be immensely useful in all of the GitHub repos that I hack on.

I am interested in being a mentor for TPF this year as well, and some of the random projects that I would be interested in mentoring are:

Finish BigInt support in Parrot, which may be necessary for Crypto stuff.